Kamala Harris has sought the counsel of twice-failed presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton on the best way to reverse diving approval ratings while at the same navigating the travails of public life, according to a report Thursday.
The vice president has also concluded she would get better treatment in the media if she were white and male like all of her predecessors, telling her allies her current travails are manifestly unfair, according to the piece in the New York Times.
For guidance she has sought out Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and famously once complained about a “right wing conspiracy” against her.
Harris “has turned to powerful confidantes, including Clinton, to help plot a path forward,” the Times reported. She hosted Clinton in her West Wing office in November, the paper further outlined.
She has also reached out to former secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, as well as recently departed German Chancellor Angela Merkel as her problems mount.
“Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, all of whom were white and male,” according to the account. “She also has confided in them about the difficulties she is facing with the intractable issues in her portfolio, such as voting rights and the root causes of migration.”
Defending Harris in the piece are ally Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg, who challenged Harris and Joe Biden during the 2020 primaries.
“So how do I know it’s actually working?” Vice President Kamala Harris comments as she charges an electric vehicle during a visit to Brandywine, Md. (Michael Reynolds/UPI)
“What the White House could’ve done is been clearer with the expectations of what was supposed to happen under her watch,” said Bass.
Buttigieg pointed to the demands of the job as holding back Harris from winning more public applause: “I think it’s no secret that the different things she has been asked to take on are incredibly demanding, not always well understood publicly and take a lot of work as well as a lot of skill,’ he said, having been tasked with selling the more popular bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“You have to do everything except one thing, which is take credit,” he said.
Harris flew to California on Wednesday night before the story was released. It contains no comment from her, yet as recently as July Democrat women political strategists gathered for a dinner in Washington, DC, to discuss Harris’s media “crisis,” as Breitbart News reported.
Former adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, Kiki McLean, hosted the dinner with former DNC officials Donna Brazile and Leah Daughtry; former Barack Obama spokesperson and Joe Biden adviser Stephanie Cutter; former Hillary Clinton spokeswomen and Democratic strategists Adrienne Elrod and Karen Finney; and former Obama communications director Jennifer Palmieri, who also worked for Hillary Clinton’s second failed presidential campaign.
The group complained that coverage of Harris reminded them of the coverage of Hillary Clinton which they perceived as sexist, even as the White House staged events with Harris and school children in an effort to make her appear more approachable.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, Harris has addressed her failure to engage the public, lamenting “there is nothing about this job that is supposed to be easy.”
“If something is coming to me, it’s because it needs to be addressed and because, by definition, it’s not going to be easy. If it was easy, it would have been handled before it comes to me,” the 57-year-old former California senator added.